His
Haggai 2:8 “ uThe silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith the Lord of hosts. 9 vyThe glory wof this latter house shall be greater than of xthe former, saith the Lord of hosts: And in this place will I give yzpeace, saith the Lord of hosts.” [1]
I. Priceless
A. Better
B. Best
II. Perfection
A. Before
B. Beyond
III. Peace
A. Benevolence
B. Being
Introduction: Happy New Year! God has given us another earthly year on His planet. If you make New Year’s resolutions this is mine. I resolve to once and for all understand what the first point of today’s message means. If I can keep this resolution my stress level will be less.
If a person could really understand what God spoke through the prophet Haggai there would be less stress in the churches. There would be less stress in individual Christians. Families could be families without having reasons to stress over who is right and who is wrong. As the old song said, “What a wonderful world it would be.”
During these holidays my mind returns to those times when my northern family would get together and Uncle Albert would come into the room with his famous saying, “Who’s winning the goods or the bads?” That question is more on the minds of people today than any time before at least in my lifetime. Who is your example of a righteous person? Who is your example of a person not to follow?
Even that question could be summed up in the first point of today’s message. We are not our own person anymore if we have truly accepted the fact that God is Lord of our life. We would not need to worry about who to have as a righteous example or whom we should follow.
Happy New Year? The first words in the preamble to our nations Declaration of Independence are these, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Notice that it does not say that we are guaranteed to be happy as citizens of the United States of America. It says that we are endowed by God with certain rights. One of these rights is the pursuit of happiness. We are free to look for that which makes us happy. Are we? Do we all define happy to mean the same thing?
My dad used to say that my brother Jack and I were opposites. Jack was a civil engineer. He was happy to sit in the house and study and make drawings. I wanted to be on the water fishing or sitting in the woods listening to the beagles run rabbits. My dad was a builder and would take the drawings from a civil engineer and make somebody else’s plans become a reality. He had an eighth grade education but he could understand if someone else’s plans were OK or not. Dad was happy. My brother Jack was happy. To put my dad in an office to draft out plans would make my dad very unhappy. To put my brother Jack out in the field supervising guys on bulldozers would make Jack unhappy.
We are responsible for our own definition of happiness. That is what I believe the preamble to our declaration of independence means. Nobody can tell you what makes you happy. If they try then they are a dictator and not a leader. We are endowed by our Creator. God gives us what and who and whose we are. We are His. If we can once and for all resolve this in our heart of hearts, that we are His; everything else will fall into place for us in 2023 and the rest of eternity. Amen…
Scripture: The focal scripture today is Haggai 2:8-9. Please stand if you’re able.
Prayer: Let us pray. Be seated.
Message: Solomon said that there is nothing new under the sun. Leave your Bible open to Haggai and follow as we read starting at Haggai 1:1, “*aIn the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, in the first day of the month, came the word of the Lord †by Haggai the prophet unto bZerubbabel the son of cShealtiel, ||ccgovernor of Judah, and to dJoshua the son of deJosedech, eethe high priest, saying, 2 Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, saying, This people say, The time is not come, the time that the Lord’s house should be built. 3 Then came the word of the Lord fby Haggai the prophet, saying,4 gIs it time for you, O ye, to dwell in your hcieled houses, And this house lie twaste?” [2]
There is enough in that which we just heard for many messages. Catch this; God spoke to Haggai words that He wanted the governor and the chief priest to hear together. Why? When the government told us that we must close the churches because of a new virus, what did we do? When the local and state government come together and tell us that we must get rid of the local churches so that a communist company can build a place for their workers to come and work, what do the churches do? When the government tells the church to fall in line and the church does as they are told to by the government, who leads whom?
In Haggai’s time the people had been in exile for seventy years but now they were allowed to return. The temple was a mess and nobody seemed to care. This can be taken literally and figuratively. The building was a mess that was to be the meeting place for the people but the spiritual temple, that house not made with hands, that place that houses the Holy Spirit, the people themselves were spiritually not ready to be the vessels that God could use.
As we read on we hear God reminding His people of the shambles everything was that they had attempted without Him. Why is the planet having such a time of climate upheaval? It is not because of what God gave us. It is because we are misusing that which He expects us to be!
First point! Whose stuff is it anyway and what is it that is precious to you? Going back to Solomon again; in His time as king silver was so plentiful that it was no more precious than tin. Today we know that silver is precious not only as a something that jewelry is made from but our electronics depend on silver for its ability to conduct electrical signals. In the scheme of what is precious silver it better but Gold is best. Gold is even more precious than silver. We count gold as the standard for currency or at least we once did.
But whose are these things that we call precious? God told both the government and the church that everything belongs to God. The government and the religious leaders were in agreement with what they felt should make people happy. God knows otherwise because we are His. We don’t belong to religious leaders and we certainly don’t belong to the government. We are His.
Second point! There is good and better but they are not perfect. Only perfect is perfect. We live in a time now that we are happy to get what is good enough. For those of us who can remember a life prior to this so-called pandemic, there was a time when a person could count on someone’s word. Do I have an appointment at 1pm? That’s what the reminder text said yesterday. No sir, you’ve got it wrong. You were supposed to be here at 12n so you’re an hour late. We’re going to have to charge you for a missed appointment. So you show the person who texted you the text that she herself sent you the day before; the same one who made the mistake on the office calendar. Oh well, that’s good enough…
It’s not good enough! We are not to be happy when we only give a portion of ourselves to God. When we remember what He has given for us it should make us sick not to give ourselves perfectly to God. We give ourselves to every other cause and when people don’t follow our lead to follow Jesus they learn from our example that good enough is OK for God but for what I want only perfection will do.
When you recall the past and consider your present situation does that make you happy? Do you suppose it makes God happy? He expects our beyond to be greater than our before. Does God expect anything that cannot be accomplished? No! If God wants something from us then He will give us what we need to accomplish the perfection that He alone deserves. Does that make you happy? Nobody else can give you what you need that is perfect. Only God can. Why? Because we are His!
Point three! Peace. What is peace? If you are at odds with the One who created you, can there be true peace? God will do everything at His disposal to get what is His back into the place where He can use what is His. You will not find happiness until you finally realize that truth.
We live and let live as the saying goes. Just let it go and do the best you can because you can’t force people to define happiness the same way that you do. That’s what the world has been so successful in telling Christians.
This is not a popularity contest. The church has mistakenly thought that we are in a popularity contest with the rest of the world and that has led to our downfall. There is no more peace for Christians in this world because we have caved in to the pressures of those who confuse personal happiness with truth. He is the way, the truth, and the life.
There is no satisfaction, or contentment or whatever else you might define as being happy without God. Paul finally figured that out in Philippians 4:12, “I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed dboth to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.” [3] Did he succeed in his pursuit of happiness? Verse 11, “Not that I speak in respect of bwant: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be ccontent.” [4] And finally Paul learned what he was capable of with God, “13 I can do all things ethrough Christ fwhich strengtheneth me.” [5] We can do all things that He places in front of us to do because we are His.
Prayer:
Invitation: Let us resolve to be His in 2023. Consider as we sing…
u 1 Chr. 29:14, 16. Comp. ver. 3.
v Zech. 2:5. See John 1:14. Comp. Matt. 12:6.
y So Ps. 85:8, 9.
w Comp. ch. 1:8.
x Comp. ver. 3. Also Ezra 3:12 (Heb.).
y So Ps. 85:8, 9.
z See Eph. 2:14.
[1] The Holy Bible: King James Version (Electronic Edition of the 1900 Authorized Version., Hag 2:8–9). (2009). Logos Research Systems, Inc.
* About B.C. 520.
a Ezra 4:24. & 5:1. ver. 15. ch. 2:10. Zech. 1:1, 7.
† Heb. by the hand of Haggai. ver. 3. ch. 2:1, 10. Zech. 7:7, 12. Mal. 1:1. See 1 Kin. 16:12.
b See 1 Chr. 3:19.
c See 1 Chr. 3:17.
|| Or, captain. See 1 Kin. 10:15. & Ezra 5:14.
cc ver. 14. ch. 2:2, 21.
d See Ezra 3:2. & Neh. 12:7.
d See Ezra 3:2. & Neh. 12:7.
e 1 Chr. 6:15.
ee Zech. 3:1.
f Ezra 5:1.
g Comp. 2 Sam. 7:2. Ps. 132:3–5.
h See Deut. 33:21 marg.
t ver. 4. So Neh. 2:3, 17. Jer. 33:10, 12 (Heb.).
[2] The Holy Bible: King James Version (Electronic Edition of the 1900 Authorized Version., Hag 1). (2009). Logos Research Systems, Inc.
d So 1 Cor. 4:11. 2 Cor. 6:10. & 11:27.
[3] The Holy Bible: King James Version (Electronic Edition of the 1900 Authorized Version., Php 4:12). (2009). Logos Research Systems, Inc.
b Mark 12:44.
c See 1 Tim. 6:6.
[4] ibid. Php 4:11). (2009). Logos Research Systems, Inc.
e So John 15:5. 2 Cor. 12:9.
f 1 Tim. 1:12 (Gk.). 2 Tim. 4:17. Heb. 11:34. So Col. 1:11.
[5] ibid. Php 4:13). (2009). Logos Research Systems, Inc.
